Almost ready for ALT-C 2013

ALT-C 2013 is now less than a week away and I think we (Roy Williams and I) are almost ready for our workshop on Tuesday 10th Sept at 3.00 pm – Learning in the Open.

There’s nothing like having to be ready for a conference presentation to focus the mind. People have always told me in the past that the value of conferences lies in networking and of course keeping up to date with the latest ideas – but I wonder if the real value lies in the necessity to reflect on your own work and its value.

In our session we will share the work we have done on Footprints of Emergence. This has been ongoing for a couple of years. I drew my first footprint in May 2011. I remember really struggling to sort out and make sense of the first tentative ideas that we had. This was the result – a very crude drawing around some very tentative ideas.

Since then we have published our paper ‘Footprints of Emergence’ and continued to work on improving the clarity around the drawing process and the learning factors that we consider when doing this. This work is ongoing and is not easy. We continue to have lengthy discussions about what we mean by the language we use and the results of these discussions and our thinking is recorded on our open wiki.

Our latest work, in preparation for ALT-C has been to clarify the drawing process, which we have now described on the video below (we are still working on improving this video too!), and to improve our descriptions of the factors that we use for drawing.

We are looking forward to some critical discussion about the Footprints of Emergence at ALT-C and invite people to look at or join our open wiki. We also have an open Moodle discussion forum on the SCoPE community’s site, courtesy of Sylvia Currie and BCcampus.